I can't find the thread, but I think someone recently mentioned upgrading the broadband to get more bandwidth. I don't know where we are contractually with BT, but maybe it's worth switching to another provider such as Be, who are apparently very cheap, fast and reliable.

I rang them and the guy I spoke to said forest would be able to get this on the BT business line and could expect download speeds of 14Mbps. Uploads would be 1.5Mbps. He confirmed the cost would be £21.50 a month in total, with a £24 connection fee. (Last time I checked we pay about £35 a month to BT for broadband)

The only possible complication is that the direct debit may need to be set up via an individual's account rather than the business account, though possibly not.

He said the service is compatible with Linux, though of course they only support Windoze & Mac.

Be are highly recommended by all my techie friends and I have personal reasons for disliking BT; Have you heard of Phorm? It's a tracking service that watches every webpage you visit so you can get more targeted adverts and *cough*spam*cough* emails from your service provider. It's a massive privacy invasion and there's nothing you can do about it, since it's all done at BT's end of the connection. They ran this in secret without informing anybody and passed all of the customer's data to this third party. More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webwise and http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/29/phorm_roundup/ and http://badphorm.co.uk/

It might be worth checking out Virgin. I did make a thorough attempt to get cable many moons ago but they (Telewest in those days) refused to accept that we could be connected, despite the existing sockets of theirs. But that was ages ago and may worth another go.

Need to get a MAC code from BT. I can do this if it is what the people want.

I checked Virgin. As far as I could tell, they are more expensive and they like to limit your gigabytage. Be is unlimited subject to fair usage policy. Anyone know how much gigabytage we use per month, overall?

Well, I've been a Telewest/Virgin customer since the early days of cable and they've been very good. There is some throttling on residential connections at certain times of day after you pass a certain quota (a lot of video downloads) but mostly get full 10 meg, much better than any ADSL I've experienced.

i'm sure i've phoned BT about something a couple of years ago and they said that our connection always gets capped due to high usage after about a day into the month.

the best way we can combat this is by using the QoS settings on the WRT router. we have things setup which we think are working, but the firmware is ooold and doesn't have nifty features such as graphs for QoS differentiation and logs of individual machines throughput.

mike - could i ask that you have a look at upgrading the firmware? while i know there are various distros based on the OpenWRT (Gargoyle seems a together project) or DD-WRT which do nifty things, i'm afraid i don't have the lunix-fu to go about it. something that allows us to drill down to what traffic is going where and refine our QoS would be awesome if possible.

hey, if you don't like it, post on the BB (so you can ask about participating for better) | MilkMiruku

I just called Be again. They're offering genuinely no limits (they say), up to 20meg broadband for £17.88 per month. I'm thinking we should just go for this. Be have a good reputation and it sounds like BT have been pretty shit lately? And Be is cheaper.

Just got off the phone with highly annoying BT legalspeak person. They flatly refuse to give any ground on the contract. They are sending me an official statement of their legal position and telling me I should take it up with the telecoms regulator. So that, I suppose, is what I will do.